


rearrange your world

by learmantha



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, M/M, Slow Burn, are these good metaphors or just pretentious: more at 11
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 16:09:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9191255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/learmantha/pseuds/learmantha
Summary: a.k.a, the one where the gangsey meets in college, with all the angst and banter you never asked for





	

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _a.k.a, the one where blue opens herself up_

_Deep breath in, deep breath out._

Blue’s nerves felt like bolts of electricity that pinged from one point of her body to another. She’d never been so far away from the comfortable familiarity of her family. Blue had squirmed in her mother’s grasp as she left, but now, she’d do anything to have Maura’s arms around her. She crossed the campus and hoped she was coming off as aloof and intimidating. Her first class was Biological Foundations I, one of her only 8am classes, and from the looks of it, she could tell she was not going to fit in with her classmates.

She found an empty seat right around the middle- the sweet spot where she could exude the right amount of ambition. The lanky boy next to her was engrossed in conversation with a boy next to him. Wrapped around his left wrist was one of the biggest and gaudiest watches Blue had ever seen. _Yeah_ , she thought, _definitely not getting any peer support groups in this course._

“Yeah, I can tell he’s just trying buy my love with a new Fisker, but it’s not going to work,” Watch Boy said.

_What the hell’s a Fisker?_

The professor walked in, and silence took up all the space in the room. 10 minutes into him speaking, Blue could feel herself slipping into sleep. It wasn’t that she was uninterested in biology, it was more just that the professor was another middle-aged white man with a monotone voice who was reading the syllabus out loud. The words on the sheet in front of her began to bleed as her eyelids got heavy and her consciousness began to slip.

There was an obnoxious tap on her desk that reverberated through her bones, sending a shock throughout her body. Blue shot straight up. Watch Boy flashed a smile at her and raised two fingers in a mock salute in lieu of an actual greeting. Blue twisted her mouth into the best forced smile she could muster, then turned back to the front, where the professor had actually started teaching. Blue began scrawling down notes as best she could, and could feel the familiar flame of anxiety rising in her gut. _Damn it_ , she thought, _This is definitely going to be a long year_.

* * *

Blue was finally finished with classes, but her day was not yet over. She slipped through the back door of Nino’s, one of the cafés on campus and her only source of income. It wasn’t anything special, but that’s what made it such a hotspot for hipsters. It wasn’t Starbucks, and for some reason that made people think they’d discovered something special as soon as they walked in. _Pretentious fucks_ , Blue thought, as she rolled her eyes. Other than that, she enjoyed her work. She liked to think of herself as a human encapsulation of Nino's- small but mighty. The barista bar was operated by one person at a time in four hour shifts, and she made pretty good money doing it. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. 

> _**Maura:** Open yourself up. I’m saying this not only as a gifted psychic but also as_  
>  _a doting mother._

Blue rolled her eyes and slipped on her apron and visor. But she couldn’t ignore the feeling that maybe she took this whole college thing way too fast. She’d been so scared in that room- what kind of idiot falls asleep on the first day? Everyone in that room knew what they were doing, and she felt like a child in comparison. Not only that, but she was one of very few girls in her class. She had never let her gender become a knife that someone could point at her chest, but how did it work when you were the one holding it? Her cultivated “edginess” was usually her armor, but in that room, it had become a whetstone. She rolled her eyes at herself this time.  _God, tone it down a bit, edgelord_.

She took a deep breath, and put herself behind the register, letting her coworker slink away. "Good luck," they whispered to her as she took their place. Blue knew she'd need it. She went to ring up her first customer, and there he was: Watch Boy staring back at her, bright smile and all. “I’ll have a macchiato. You’re welcome, by the way.” Blue smiled, and was shocked to feel it was genuine. She started making his drink and let Watch Boy ramble on. “I’m Henry, by the way. If I’m going to keep waking you up in class we might as well get on a first name basis…” He stopped to search for her nametag. “Blue.” That prompted a raised eyebrow. She shrugged. “My mom wanted to raise me to be an eccentric child.” Henry made one of those noises that was almost a laugh but not quite.

“The edgiest looking girl in the world who happens to be a biology major and works in a café at a college in Boston? I’d say she did good.”

“Come on, the whole world?”

“The greater Boston area, then.”

“If I had a drink, I’d drink to that.”

“When’s your next break? I’ll buy one.”

It was Blue's turn to raise an eyebrow. “Of coffee, I hope.”

Henry grinned. “Of course. Alcohol on the first meeting is not my style.”

Blue added the finishing touches to Henry’s drink. “I’ve still got four hours.” Henry's phone buzzed, and when he checked the screen, the side of his mouth dipped into a frown. He grabbed his macchiato when Blue was finished and raised his other hand in a wave, and Blue was nearly blinded by the light reflecting off that ungodly watch. “Unfortunately, I’ve got some unresolved errands. I’ll see you in class, Blue.” Blue lifted her hand in a small wave, but Henry had already whipped around, heading off to an “unresolved errand”, whatever the hell that meant. Blue was surprised she was genuinely sad to see him go, but quickly turned her attention to the next customer. Her mind began to slip and the only thing she focused on was making drinks. She found it calming- it gave her hands something to do, and the amount of concentration it took allowed her to block out any intrusive thoughts. Eventually, the whiteboard of her brain was erased until it was completely blank.

* * *

Blue's shift was finally over, and she was starving. She quickly rang up a salad and water for herself before handing off the register to a different coworker. After standing for so long, sitting felt so insanely good. She was lost in bliss she didn't even notice Henry approaching her, second drink in hand and friend in tow.

"Blue, my dear!" Blue snapped out of her haze. "This is my friend Richard Gansey the third, emphasis on third." As they took seats at Blue's table, Richard reached out to shake her hand. "Please, just call me Gansey. Please."  _Gansey_ , she thought, toying with the sound of it in her head.

"Gansey," Henry started, "this is Blue. She almost fell asleep in biology today."

"Blue? Like the color?" Gansey asked. Blue nodded. "This whole time I thought I was hearing you wrong. Blue," he said, trying it out.

"Her mother raised her to be eccentric," Henry said. "And how could she do that with some kind of mundane name, like-" Henry paused as he searched for a name plain enough to make his point. "- _Jane_ _?_ _"_ he decided at last.

Blue laughed. At first sight, they were such polar opposites. Henry was charming in a loud and boisterous way, whereas Gansey had that natural charm to him, without even saying a word. But maybe it was just the way that his appearance just oozed wealth. He looked like he'd walked out of a Polo ad- just without any sense of color coordination. It didn't hurt that his hair was too-shiny-too-be-true and his skin was perfectly tanned. His watch was nowhere near as gauche as Henry's, but Gansey had his own vice- a pair of Top Siders. _Open yourself up_ , Blue thought to herself. It was going to be harder than she thought.

But Henry made it easier. He picked up on the quiet moments, but wasn't afraid of them. She learned that Henry was hoping to go into biotech ("make lives better and stuff, you know?") and Gansey was a history major ("do you know any Welsh kings?"). They were living in the same building as her, just two floors above. Both Gansey and Henry's parents were filthy rich, but the Ganseys had "succumbed to the machine of government" whereas the Chengs were more of a "That One Percent" kind of family. Both of them talked about their extensive travels around the world, and Blue, who'd never been out of the South before college, drank it all up. They'd made a pact that they'd all go to Venezuela together one day- just the three of them. Blue had become friends with possibly the two richest people on campus on her first day of college. Maybe "opening up" wasn't so bad after all.

Their conversation had come to a silence, but it wasn't uncomfortable. "Wait," Blue said, turning to Henry. "I need you to answer me one thing. What the hell is a Fisker?"

Henry almost laughed. “I’m so used to hanging out with entitled pricks, I forgot that some people don’t have obscene amounts of money to blow on flashy cars. Unfortunately, I am an entitled prick as well, and I’ve got a Fisker, one of those high-end electric cars that are definitely overpriced- if you saw one, you’d know it cost too much.”

“Kind of like your watch."

Henry’s laugh filled the room and bounced off the walls of the small café. “Yeah, another gift from the dad to buy my love. They just never know when to stop.” Gansey looked down at his hands.

Blue shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

Henry’s smile vanished and his expression turned serious. He exchanged a wary glance with Gansey, then said, “Dads are usually assholes anyways. Especially if they disappeared.”

Gansey raised his cup. "I'll drink to that," he said. She knocked her drink against his in agreement, and they both took a sip.

Henry’s sunny smile was back as he drank from his own drink.

Blue could definitely get used to this.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!
> 
> come talk to me on tumblr!  
> learmantha.tumblr.com :-)


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